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It was the middle of the night when Krile awoke. She couldn’t have said what had awoken her, only that it had been sudden.
It had been a strange dream she’d had, but Krile had grown accustomed to strange dreams. It was not to be wondered at, after the events of the past few months. And besides, the Baldesion Annex was a place filled with her own ghosts. Sometimes it didn’t seem quite real; surely, if she were to walk out into the hall quietly enough, she would hear laughter, and encounter the same group of sleep-deprived students who had always been there late at night. And perhaps she would turn a corner, and find Minfilia walking silently across the floors, with the soft white of her nightdress billowing around her.
She made her way into the hall as quietly as she could. Raha was a light sleeper, and she didn’t want to wake him just now. She wasn’t ready to talk of her dream, or of anything yet. In the daytime, she could be sensible Krile Mayer Baldesion, capable and constant. Without the light she was someone else entirely.
*
The figure standing alone in the hall was not one of the ghosts who belonged there. She was tall, and dishevelled, and quite, quite real. Krile had never seen her face before, and yet she was a presence as familiar as the breath in her body, a presence so sorely missed that seeing her again felt like a rush of air into her lungs.
Krile stood there a moment, hardly daring to breathe. Perhaps, if she moved, the person in front of her would hear her, and melt away. Perhaps, if she didn’t move, she would never have to find out that it was a dream, or an illusion, or something else conjured by the restless wanderings of her tired mind.
Then the woman in front of her bumped into a table, and sat down very hard in the middle of the floor.
’Hydaelyn?’ said Krile, coming forward.
The woman turned, and at the sight of Krile, her face was brighter than the rising sun. ’Not Hydaelyn any more,’ she said, with the ghost of a smile on her lips. And it was true, Krile realised. This wasn’t Hydaelyn, goddess of the world and the future, all-seeing and all-knowing. This was Venat, traveller of the past and present, who bumped into furniture.
’What are you doing here?’ Krile asked. She couldn’t quite keep a big smile from breaking over her features. ’You’re never where you’re supposed to be, are you?’
’Surely not,’ said Venat, staring at Krile with a simplicity that was charming. ’I came straight to you.’
She smiled, as though there was a little secret between them. Perhaps there was: no-one else on Etheirys, not even the Warrior of Light, had felt Hydaelyn’s—nay, Venat’s—presence as she had.
*
Venat was hungry. She evidently wasn’t in the habit of it. She had used the last of her will to get here to Krile, and now she was quite unable to decide on anything. She stared helplessly at Krile from the middle of the floor. She was quite impossibly tall, taller than Krile even when sitting down.
Krile pulled herself together, and led Venat down to the Last Stand, where one of the culinarians was on a late-night shift. Venat waited quietly as Krile decided their order for them; it was entirely beyond her to say what she wanted, for she’d never had a chance to think about it.
They sat down in view of the ocean. It was still quite light, the sort of Sharlayan twilight that blurred dusk into dawn. Waves were coming in, restless and never still, and the water glowed beneath the sky.
’Were the seas the same in your time?’ Krile asked. A moment later, she felt the absurdity of the question; Venat was of their time now, had been at the centre of their world for so many eons now.
’I—I can’t remember,’ said Venat, staring out over the water. ‘But I believe they were, or there was something very like. Such a music must be eternal.’
*
When they went back, Venat looked terribly lost in the wide corridors, so Krile judged it best that she should come with her.
Venat crawled into her bed, looking absurdly long-limbed, and Krile climbed in beside her, reaching as far as she could to put her arms around her. She could reach barely halfway around her back. Venat curled around her, one of her big warm hands behind Krile’s head.
’Are you well now?’ she asked.
Krile didn’t have to ask what she meant; they had shared one body, and she had learned to understand Venat’s fears only too well. ’I am not all healed, and perhaps will never be entirely, but I am well,’ she said lightly.
’I’m sorry for the times I hurt you,’ said Venat softly, stroking the curls back from Krile’s face. She was sorry, her face warm and troubled in the dim light.
‘Why did you choose me?’ Krile asked.
Venat smiled. It was an odd, whimsical smile, as though she was remembering a fond memory. ‘I used to watch you. Of course I was watching over everyone, but it wasn’t the same. I liked to hear you talk. You were a courageous leader, a wise teacher, a clearsighted interlocutor. But sometimes, I wondered if it was hard that you were so skilled, that you couldn’t choose to be something else. You had to be everything people saw in you, but you were more than that.’ She paused, considering the ceiling. ‘It was an odd thought, but I liked to fancy you my friend.’
Krile didn’t speak, but she sidled even closer to Venat, squeezing her as tight as her small arms could.
‘Did you ever resent it?’ asked Venat abruptly.
Perhaps she had; Krile didn’t know. It had been many years, and hard years they had been, filled with more terror and sorrow than she thought her heart could hold. She had lost so many of her friends, and then she had had to watch her new friends forge ahead into peril, helpless to remonstrate or to follow. She had lost much of her health and her faculties. She had seen the world blighted and imperilled, and been unable to stop it.
‘Only when you left,’ she said.
*
Raha reacted with remarkable calmness to the discovery that their erstwhile goddess had taken up residence in the Baldesion Annex.
He had had reservations about Hydaelyn, Krile knew. He had lived on a world that the light had ruined; he had watched his beloved suffer the curse of the light. Hydaelyn asked much of her world and her champions.
But Venat, quiet curious Venat, was not Hydaelyn. She was not their mother, or their goddess, no more all-powerful and all-knowing. And resentment was not Raha’s way. He was too warm-hearted not to forgive her, or to ask an explanation that she could not give. If anything, he understood, for he had been the Crystal Exarch.
Really, it wasn’t surprising that he and Venat took to one another, once they had grown accustomed to the situation. Directly he got over his bewilderment, Raha offered to show Venat the ways of the forbidden shelves in the library, and before Krile could adequately express her disapproval, they were off. She could only hope that Venat wouldn’t fall afoul of the librarians; explaining to the Forum why the former Mothercrystal was trespassing in the forbidden sections would be rather a tall order.
In a way, Raha was better equipped to be Venat’s guide than anyone else. They were both ardent and impulsive and curious, and deeply enamoured of the world, in a way that their long years hadn’t diminished. They had both suffered and given all they had to give, and then they had returned, and had to find their places again in a world that had simply moved on in their absence.
And they both loved Fyfnar dearly; that was their strongest bond.
*
Once she had recovered her strength and spirits, Venat took to walking the city streets, striking up conversation with traders and merchants.
She took a particular liking to some of the gleaners; she loved to hear them tell of the things they had discovered. It was fascinating: Venat knew a great deal, but not everything. She was enormously learned, as befitted one who had been observing the world for eons. And yet Erenville could tell her things she hadn’t known: of the ways of the vilekin deep in the forest, of how water swirled around in rapids, and how clouds formed in the sky. Venat delighted in learning, in things minute and curious and quaint.
*
And at night, Venat would come to Krile like a child wanting to be comforted, and Krile would hold her and stroke her bright hair. More than anything else, she loved to make Venat laugh.
Venat was human now, but all the same, kissing her made Krile feel as if her body was filled with light.
*
They hadn’t told Fyfnar yet that Venat was back, for Venat had drawn back from it.
Krile had wondered if it was unfair to keep the knowledge from him. She wasn’t certain how Fyfnar would react; he had been rather withdrawn since the events of the Final Days. Only G’raha could draw him out, and that rarely.
He had sorrowed deeper at Venat’s parting than any of the others. She had been his goddess, but more than that, she had been his friend. They had kept the promise they had made to each other, eons ago, in the Unsundered World. But she had not told him that keeping that promise would destroy her.
Fyfnar had been ambivalent to Hydaelyn at times, but he had loved Venat. And Venat loved him: that was plain from the softness of her smile, and the tones of her voice.
Krile sensed in her a reluctance to initiate contact, for she was determined she would not draw the Warrior of Light back to a path he had won his freedom from. And she was not Hydaelyn now, nor the Venat of old, so she didn’t know how to face him. It had been too long for her, though for him it was achingly near.
*
In the end, it was Raha who wrote to Fyfnar, and he rushed to them with a speed that was preposterous.
He came in, with quick, joyous step and tail aloft. His presence always occasioned a unique excitement; he was an oddity, a font of improbabilities. Peculiar and wonderful things happened to him, as he had happened to their world.
‘Where is she?’ he asked. There was a kind of breathlessness in his voice that Krile hadn’t often heard before; not since the time he had sprinted back to the Rising Stones, holding a newly awakened G’raha in his arms. Fyfnar had endured more than any one human being ought to, and his body and his mind bore the scars of it. But still he endured in his capacity for hope and joy, in the elasticity of his spirits.
‘Right here,’ said Venat, materalising behind him.
Fyfnar jumped, and turned with an expression of consternation. ‘Venat!’ he said. He had begun to call her that ever since he returned from the past, with a familiarity that was at once comfortable and yearning. It hadn’t been the right name for her then, but it had been entirely right that he would call her that. That name had made tears start from her eyes, because it was her name, because it wasn’t.
‘It’s really you,’ he said, and an expression of such fondness spread over his face that it made Krile choke up a little. This, indeed, was the Warrior of Light, who felt things with the breadth and vividness of the whole universe, who loved the world and the woman who had created it. ‘I thought you were gone.’
There was something halting in Venat’s face, that brightened into sheer, transcendent joy at the sight of him.
Krile came to her senses then, and left the room quietly, leaving them to themselves.
*
One day, Venat returned from the markets with a brush and a stack of canvases. ‘I remembered you saying you’d like to make pictures,’ she said, ‘so I brought you these.’
Krile stared at her. She had never thought of it before: that she could simply do this, buy a stack of canvases and dip her brush in bright urgent paint. She didn’t know how to paint, but she could paint anyway.
Always, Venat opened new ways to her.
*
Krile was good with words. She had learned to speak boldly and wisely, to intercede and to instruct. Making pictures freed her from the words for the first time. She did not have to parse every thought, and make of it something lucid and succint.
She could simply… Hear, feel, think.
She painted Raha first, with glorious disregard for form and proportion, and derived no small amusement from watching him struggle red-faced to say something complimentary. She painted Tataru, in warm, vivid shades. She painted Fyfnar; that one she was particularly proud of, for rough as it was, it seemed to hold something of the Warrior of Light’s spirit.
Finally, she painted Venat. Venat was hard to capture; though she sat obediently for Krile, the tones of her face were as subtle and varying as the sunset, and it was hard to catch the moment between transformations. But Krile loved drawing her all the same, watching the elusive play of thoughts and feelings over her face, like light on flowing water.
She painted Raha again on the sly, capturing the way his eyes lit up when he remembered a curious tale, his bright eager face when he had something to say. She watched him as he conversed with Venat, as he bent over his weighty tomes, as he tripped brightly about his tasks humming a song that Fyfnar had taught him.
It was interesting, drawing him. In some ways he hadn’t changed so very much: in the lift of his shoulders and the sparkle of his eyes, and his curiosity and excitement. She had felt oddly distant from him since he awoke, for a lot of his ways and mannerisms had altered in a hundred years. But in observing him for her drawings she felt as though she were getting to know her brother again, discovering that he was as eccentric and incorrigible as ever.
Venat tried her hand at painting too; she loved playing with form and colour, but she lacked the patience for more drawn-out compositions, and she was not one for sitting still in a studio. She liked best to be out walking amongst the people in the streets, learning and touching things, feeling the wind upon her face.
And writing: Venat had begun to keep a journal. In all her years as Hydaelyn, she had not forgotten things, and so she had had no recourse to such a tool. It was rather a joyous occasion to her to have to use one: to jot down memoranda, and forget where she’d put them, to put down the simplest and most mundane minutiae of her days because she wanted so much to remember them. Krile had got out a book for her from their stores, one of the old books she’d used in her own days as a young Student. Venat’s writing was bright and careless and untidy; her hands were too big for any of their pens, and her words spilled over the margins with the urgency of all she had to say.
*
Venat was looking for her glasses. She misplaced them with charming regularity, despite how frequently they turned out to be on her desk.
‘You must learn to be more attentive to your surroundings,’ said Krile briskly. ‘’I recall that to “hear, feel, think” has served your champions well.’
Venat grinned without a trace of embarrassment. ‘Such highflown ramblings aren’t your way, Mistress Krile. You are known for the appositeness of your advice. Those of us less gifted with loquacity must do our best.’
Krile snorted. ‘And here are your glasses,’ she said.
*
Venat rose early; she really slept very little, and so lightly that a breeze outside would wake her. Raha had sympathised, for he’d been irregular in his sleeping too, after the Crystal Tower. He had taught Venat his ways, and sometimes he would keep her company; they’d go outside with their books, and read in the gazebo until they fell asleep.
Venat had plenty of things to read, and Krile had let her assist with the restoration of the Students, on condition she didn’t work too hard. She was an odd assistant, brilliant and inspired on occasion, but with a very uneven capacity for focus.
But sometimes she would simply rise in the early morning, walk quietly to the window and peer out. If Krile woke to the sound, she would smile at her apologetically, but really Krile liked nothing better than to wake up to Venat’s smile in the morning light. She would go up to her and take her hand, and they would watch the sunrise together.
Hydaelyn was gone now, but still the world was full of light.